Item: HipChat (discontinued)
Rating: 5
Author: Joe Tresca

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The company I formerly worked at used HipChat for all inter-office employee communications. In 2013 when I started at GLG, it was the primary form of communication used by employees. Although our desks all had ip phones we almost never used them unless interfacing with clients outside of the business. Instant messaging through HipChat made a huge difference in productivity since it meant you could respond even while inside a meeting. Meetings were nearly constant at GLG and this massively improved productivity and response times.

Pros and Cons

Instant Messaging Colleagues
File Transfer
Searchable Message History

Audio quality was inconsistent. Sometimes excellent but mostly awful.
Video quality was universally poor and led us to using Zoom as our primary video communication tool.
Although HipChat supported file transfer, larger files would sometimes stop transferring.

Key Insights

Do you think HipChat (discontinued) delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with HipChat (discontinued)'s feature set?

Did HipChat (discontinued) live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of HipChat (discontinued) go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy HipChat (discontinued) again?

Alternatives Considered

Screenhero (Discontinued), Slack, Discord and Zoom Video Webinar

HipChat really cannot compete with Slack so it doesn't surprise me that they've purchased the code base from Atlassian. As I mentioned earlier in the review it's screen sharing, video/audio quality and file transfers abilities are almost universally done better by the competition including (Slack, Discord, Zoom and Skype).

Other Software Used

Slack, Zoom, Discord

Usability

The app itself had a pleasant if not generic interface. As a user experience expert and engineer I can say the interface is fairly intuitive if not bland. It does what you expect it to do and it's available on iOS and Android devices. If I recall it was generally pretty light weight in terms of installation size.

Support Rating

HipChat's support was nearly non-existent. This was one of the reasons I recall our company not wanting to get into an extended licensing agreement with Atlassian to use it. One rather humorous reason we actually stopped using the paid version and switched to the free version was because chat logs would be wiped after 30 days I believe. We used this as compliance feature and to let our clients know their sensitive information would not be at risk from a security perspective.

Likelihood to Recommend

HipChat was discontinued by Atlassian because it wasn't as versatile as Slack and couldn't handle Video/Audio calls as well as Zoom. It lacked the screen sharing capabilities of Skype and ScreenHero (now owned by Slack). It wasn't great at any particular area and its competitors were obviously better in those areas. This lack of versatility negatively impacted it's adoption at GLG, and I'd imagine the rest of world as well. HipChat excels at instant messaging communication (which is the one thing they got right) and although you could make specific rooms to chat about certain topics, Slack was already doing this way better. Overall it's impossible to recommend this software today. If I recall it was very expensive compared to better and more feature rich competitors. If you're seeking a bare bones method of communication you may consider the free version of it, but outside of that scenario, you are almost certainly better off going with a different product.

HipChat an instant message platform that misses the mark.

Overall Satisfaction with HipChat (discontinued)